Less than they used to, and the published data conflicts. LinkedIn removed hashtag following in 2024 and shifted toward reading the post text itself, and a widely cited 2026 Metricool study of 673,658 posts found that posts with at least one hashtag earned about 85 percent more impressions than the platform average. That correlation is worth treating carefully, since accounts that use hashtags thoughtfully also tend to do everything else better.
Other 2026 analyses found engagement peaking at a single hashtag and declining past three, and hashtag usage among creators has fallen substantially. The practical rule that survives all of it is to use one to five specific, relevant tags, place them at the end rather than mid-sentence, and stop writing thirty-tag blocks. On YouTube and TikTok, the title, caption, and spoken content matter far more than the tags.
